Sometimes you don’t talk at all. You just stare at the TV, thoughtlessly running your hand up my nightgown. Slightly uneasy, I remember a time when my brother, bored senseless in the back of the car, would trace secret messages on my arms, and I’d try to guess what he had written. I wonder what you’d write. Maybe Am I my brother’s keeper? or perhaps It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Maybe you’d just write, I really like your upper thighs. Sometimes you talk a lot. About how difficult it was to leave Italy and how the pizza here tastes like cardboard and sawdust. You tell me how much you love your daughter, and how hard it is to live so far away from her. Lowering your voice, you quietly mention that your mother died when you were very young, and that you’ve been a fuck-up and fucked up and desperate to fuck and a sad, sorry fuck ever since. You tell me about the accident that rendered you partially blind, and even though you speak without tears, I feel the cracks in your teapot deepen. I could say so many things, but I simply touch the skin underneath your ghost town eye, spelling out all the things I could’ve said. Then we go to bed, and I become the haunted house you so desperately want to live in, having put to sleep all your ache inside my body.

someday we must sever
like the stars and the moon
though I dream of forever
starless nights come too soon
I will whisper our names
during those dark hours
tracing the branches of my veins
until my life lines
draw starry signs
and wild flowers